AP 0988: How Do I Put Everything I’m Learning Together?

By Pat Flynn on November 2, 2017

AskPat 988 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what’s up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 988 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I’m here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question coming in today from Alana, but before we get to that I do want to thank today’s sponsor, which is FreshBooks, one of my favorite companies because they help serve me and millions of other small businesses with managing our business finances. What that means is keeping track of our income, automatically keeping track of our expenses, giving us the ability to create forms, and see our balance sheets, and profit and loss statements, and all those kinds of things, which are very necessary in business, but also with invoicing. They help us keep track of who owes us money, who has even yet to open those invoices, which is really interesting, and just makes it really easy to send invoices out in the first place. So, if you want to check out FreshBooks for free for thirty days, just go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

Awesome. Now here’s today’s question from Alana.

Alana: Hey Pat. Alana here. I really appreciate all you do for online entrepreneurs. I started my first business by listening to your site, that was Amazon, and now I am into my second business. I’m actually a sales consultant by trade and I’m building a new website that’s going to be taking on some online sales of a product that I’m developing, so I’m learning about landing pages, email funnels, all this stuff, but I’m not quite sure how to put it all together. What comes first? Chicken or the egg? Because basically what I’m asking—I need to know what resources you recommend . . . podcasts, episodes, to teach me the proper order to do things in so I’m not wasting time, money, and making a bunch of mistakes. I just bought Will It Fly? so if that is one of the suggestions, I already know I’m on the right track, but is there anything else that you think I should be doing? Again, I’m building a website, I’m looking for new sales clients, but this website is going to offering a unique service, and I want to get it done within the next six months. So anything that you can offer for help, I really appreciate it. I think you’re awesome, thank you.

Pat Flynn: Hey Alana, thank you so much for this question. You are not the first person to ask something like this, although the first to ask this question on AskPat. I’ve been asked this question several times in many different forms before, which is why I built out my BYOB course. If you’ve never heard of that, you might be like, “What? Bring your own beer? I don’t get it.” It’s Build Your Own Brand, and you can find that at SmartPassiveIncome.com/byob. It’s a five day challenge built within a course, within Teachable, which many of my students from other courses are very familiar with. They have the same username and access to it, but it’s free and it walks you through it in five days, the order of operations for getting your website up and building it out. It’s also going to give you some more information for what to do after you do that, in terms of emails, what landing pages are, how they play a role in everything, and then there’s some information in there about launching your brand too. That should give you some good, just foundational information Alana. Really, it’s all about building a website first, getting your domain and brand mission all nailed down, like even before you buy your domain, even hosting package. The first step is knowing what it is you’re doing, what the unique selling proposition is, what’s the brand name going to be, and the domain name that goes along with that. There’s a little bit of research involved with that. There’s also some internal research that’s involved, internal like in your brain and your heart—Why are you doing this, who is it for, who’s your target audience? That kind of stuff. That’s stuff that you’ve likely already done if you’ve already started building a product and Will It Fly?, yes, absolutely will help you through that process, so you are headed in the right direction. Then it’s building out the website, picking out a theme, not getting too crazy with the design of it, not spending a ton of money on customizations just yet. It’s just about putting your mark on the internet and putting content out there and then the email service provider would be the next step, I believe. I recommend ConvertKit, AskPat.com/convertkit. That is a affiliate link and that is also a company I’m a compensated advisor for, so just being honest about that. ConvertKit allows you to start to build your email, start to segment it, to connect with all these other things that are going to happen on your website. It just makes it really easy to do. [Full Disclosure: I’m a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit.]

From there, creating lead magnets for specific pieces of content, that’s where the landing pages might come in because you might say on a podcast, or say on the blog, “Hey, by the way, I have this free thing that you can get and you can get it here on this landing page,” and then you can bring people to that website, they’re going to send you their name and email in exchange for that thing, and then they’re going to be in ConvertKit. That’s really just the foundational items you might need to get started.

From there, the tools that I would suggest you add relate specifically to what it is that you’re doing and what you need to keep track of. For example, if you’re doing a physical product, you’re going to need something that could potentially be like ShipStation, which allows you to easily print out labels based on the transactions that happen and all those kinds of things. Depending on what it is you’re selling, perhaps a shopping cart is something like SamCart, or maybe it’s more like a Shopify thing. There’s many ways to go about it.

SmartPassiveIncome.com/byob, that’s the free Build Your Own Brand course. Smartpassiveincome.com/byob, check that out. That’s a great place to get going. Alana, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate you, can’t wait to hear how this all goes down and I’m looking forward to hearing more from you later. I do want to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you’d like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you and here’s a quote to finish off the day by Dr. Seuss. And that is, “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go . . .” Happy graduation maybe, for some of you if you’re listening to this around May or June. If not, just . . . awesome poem anyway. Dr. Seuss rocks. All right guys, take care, and I’ll see you in the next episode of AskPat.

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Show Notes

Alana has a question about starting out. She’s building a website and looking for new clients—how does she put everything she’s learning together, and what suggestions do I have for her?

In this episode I mention my new, free five-day challenge and course: Build Your Own Brand. In this course I walk you through the process of creating a foundational website. Check it out today at SmartPassiveIncome.com/byob.

I recommend checking out SmartPassiveIncome.com/convertkit, an amazing tool for building an email list. [Full Disclosure: I’m a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit.]

I also recommend my book Will It Fly?, which is all about idea validation and testing your next business idea.

Do you have a question about online business? Record it at AskPat.com.

Today’s sponsor is FreshBooks. Go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section for more information.